3Delight/Blender 0.5.4

May 5th, 2011 . 14 comments

I’ve now updated the 3Delight/Blender exporter to be compatible with Blender 2.57. Hopefully now there’s a ‘stable’ release, the Python API will fluctuate less and I can spend whatever spare time I have on developing this further, rather than fixing it to make it work! 🙂

The bpy API has changed recently to be stricter about where and when it will allow modifying scene data. This has had the effect of preventing some things happening as automatically as I would like, and I’ve had to make some things a bit more manual. Now, before using shaders for the first time, you need to click a button ‘Initialise Shader Parameters’ will will read the data from the shader file on disk and generate the UI inside Blender for it. This only needs to be done once on blender startup, and once when you use a new shader. It will automatically initialise all shaders correctly at render time, so it should still work rendering from the command line. I’d like this to happen all automatically behind the scenes but until there are new features added to Blender to support this, it’ll have to do.

As well as fixes, there are couple of new features. It now supports motion blurred dynamic hair (strands), deep shadow maps, and motion blurred shadows/ray tracing via the samplemotion attribute. The last two were contributed by Magnus Loefgren – thanks!

Get the new package here: render_3delight_0.5.4b.zip

edit 10/05/2011: Released a 0.5.4b version, with path handling fixes for Windows – download above

§ 14 Responses to 3Delight/Blender 0.5.4"

  • kilikoro says:

    Thanks alot alot alot Matt 😉

  • wafa says:

    Great news now….

    … testing testing testing 🙂

  • Matt says:

    Note: Still more problems on windows (sigh!). I’ll try and sort it out asap.

  • Ash says:

    its a great post . thanks

  • hmmm not it can’t find the shaders, even if I set the shader directory manually.

    Shader x not found in path. It renders with some strange default materials if don’t touch anything so otherwise it seems to work, maybe.

  • And great to see you working on this!

  • Patrik says:

    You do a great work Matt! Do you have any schedule of your development so I can see what will follow in upcoming releases. Those features I’m missing right now, is single shadowmap for animation, cubics shadowmap for pointlights, and a toggle of rendering shadowmaps or use premade once.

    Take care!

  • Matt says:

    Thanks all!

    I just uploaded a new version (0.5.4b) which should hopefully work properly on Windows. Got a virtualbox with Windows XP up and running on my Mac which should help a lot now. Let me know how it goes!

    Patrik: thanks! Controlling some of those shadow map things will come soon – it’s high up on my list. As for shadow mapped point lights, that will eventually too. Currently it’s exporting blender’s lamps using the default 3delight shaders, but I want to work on a set of shaders to be packaged with this exporter that work together nicely, and probably roll all the light types into one big light shader that supports that stuff.

  • Great it works!

    Spot light’s intensity is greyed out for me and stays at 1.0

    I like scripting myself and beginning to really like 3delight/renderman, I bought the Advanced Renderman book and hopefully I get some free time this summer to help you support more features of 3delight. Can’t promise anything yet though.

  • hmm now spot lights work… I’ll see if I kind find why it didn’t before

  • joel says:

    thanks matt!! it’s working just fine for me, windows 7 64-bit. shaders all seem to work. the only problem i’m seeing is multiple materials on an object not rendering – are multiple materials not supported yet?

    and is there a way to use this to export to, say, Aqsis or Pixie? i’ve tried and haven’t been successful. i’m probably doing something incorrectly though.

    thanks a ton anyway!

  • Matt says:

    hi joel, glad to hear it’s working. No, multiple material IDs aren’t supported yet – I predict it’ll be a bit of a pain to enable so other things are a higher priority to work on atm.

    As for other renderers, I would assume it’s not entirely compatible. I’m not too familiar with the detailed capabilities of aqsis and pixie (although I’m sure they do a lot less than 3delight), so I’m not really able to say how easy it would be to support them too. It’s possible that it may not be much work, but it’s also not something that I’m considering important to pursue at this time – I’m more interested in getting it working smoothly and seamlessly for 3delight right now rather than crappy support for many renderers. Of course if anyone else wants to look into this issue I’d be quite interested to see their results and open to the idea of adding extra support provided it doesn’t make the code much more complex or require more maintenance effort.

    cheers

  • joel says:

    hi matt, thanks for your quick answer! no problem, i was just curious about these things; aqsis doesn’t have raytracing capabilities and i don’t know anything about pixie, so i’m content to stick with 3delight regardless. i’ll just find a workaround for the single-materials-per-object situation.

    i’m sure people tell you this all the time, but thank you again for all your work and immense contribution to the blender community.

  • Max Puliero says:

    thankyou man!

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